The Rudolf Steiner Archive

32. Goethe’s “Faust”: Exoteric

[ 1 ] In August 1831, Goethe completed the second part of his Faust, as his spiritual testament to humanity. The significance he himself attached to this work is evident from the words he addressed to Eckermann: “Now I have actually fulfilled my life’s work; whether I do this or that and work during the years that may still remain to me is no longer important.” The intellectual yearnings and interests he poured into this life’s work date back to the poet’s earliest youth. It is said that not everything I will say about it today is contained within it, but it has taken effect and lived on in his soul and in his creative power. In 1827, he said that in his second “Faust,” he had taken care to ensure that the spiritual aspect—in relation to the external images and the theatrical elements—was such that it could appeal to external, sensory perception, but that for those with a deeper insight, the esoteric meaning would become quite clear. It is the inclinations, the moods—it is the entire constitution of his soul—from which emerged what became images and forms in Faust. From birth, Goethe was attuned to what might be called humanity’s penetration into the spiritual world. Not to remain content with what the external senses and the intellect bound to them provide as knowledge and wisdom, but to penetrate through the veil of the sensory world of observation—the world of the intellect—to the invisible, supersensory depths of existence!

[ 2 ] We cannot find in the young Goethe that mature wisdom which found its way into the second part of Faust; after all, he could only produce his most mature, substantial, and profound works at the end of his life. To those who later find his works incomprehensible—such as Pandora or The Natural Daughter—the young Goethe appears as a naïve poet who expressed something grand and powerful in his works, including the first part of Faust. That is something that deeply moves people; in the second part, however, he is said to have woven in eccentricities and incomprehensible nonsense.

There they praise Faust
And whatever else

Rages through my works
In their favor,

The old Mick and Mack
That makes them very happy;

They think the rabble,
That they’re no longer there!

[ 3 ] We want to trace how Faust grew out of Goethe’s life, how he always sought to penetrate to the spiritual sources of the external natural world. Even as a boy, he sought to draw near to what he then understood as the great God of Nature, as the spirit reigning behind all natural phenomena. As a seven-year-old boy, he took a music stand and placed minerals, rocks, and plants from his father’s herbarium on it to bring together the realms of nature. — This expressed, in spirit, a sense of what nature is. For the seven-year-old Goethe, this was the altar before which he wished to offer his sacrifices to the great God of Nature; and on top of it he placed a small incense stick and a magnifying glass, and he waited for the rising morning sun to gather its rays and, from the fire of the gathered rays, ignite the incense stick as a sacrificial fire to the great God of Nature.

[ 4 ] We will then see how his soul gradually came to embrace that state of mind—following his move from Frankfurt to Weimar—which he expressed with such enthusiasm in the prose hymn “Die Natur” (Nature). Here he expresses his reverence for the workings of the spirit in the following words:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to step out of her, and unable to go deeper into her. Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we grow weary and slip from her arms.

[ 5 ] He felt so at one with all that was excellent and all that was seemingly misshapen in nature that he said:

Even the most unnatural thing is part of nature; even the crudest philistinism has a touch of genius.

[ 6 ] And the other thing:

She invented death so she could have many lives.

[ 7 ] What lies between these two periods? Frankfurt and Weimar. How did he ascend to what we find in that mighty lyrical outburst in that prose hymn? Step by step, sometimes driven by an unconscious impulse, he ascended through life. Deep within, at first unconsciously, he felt an indomitable, invincible, unstoppable thirst for knowledge—one that is connected at every moment to the entirety of his life, pouring, as it were, into the entirety of his life—so that for him there can be no theory, or a world of ideas at all, without his entire world of sensations and feelings first being imbued with the very lifeblood of his heart. During his student years in Leipzig, although destined for the study of law, he studied the natural sciences. In nature he saw a kind of scripture; in natural beings and natural facts, he saw parables that, like a scripture, express and articulate something that reigns as a mystery within external, sensory nature. He did not wish to penetrate the mysteries of existence through flashes of inspiration or flights of fancy—he was naturally inclined toward a calm journey through the world, proceeding step by step, from phenomenon to phenomenon. He did not seek to comprehend the phenomena of the world through a fanciful philosophy; even though external life and the passions often raged more fiercely and, so to speak, obscured the actual, inner, calm, and sure striving—this was nevertheless always present as a deep foundation in Goethe’s life. Now, toward the end of his time in Leipzig, a life event of the gravest kind occurred that profoundly deepened his quest for knowledge: he fell gravely ill. Where must knowledge lead us if it is to be true knowledge? It must lead us to where we penetrate the mysteries of life, as if being led through locked gates—to those very gates that life itself closes. Knowledge that would shrink from the problem of death could not satisfy the earnest striving of the human soul. The approach of death, which puts an end to everything that lives within the human mind and can be perceived by the external senses, imbued his quest for knowledge with the very seriousness that his soul demanded.

[ 8 ] In Frankfurt, to which he now returned, there were other significant experiences that strongly influenced him and to which he alludes in his autobiography Poetry and Truth. He came into contact with circles characterized by the most earnest striving to unite what lives within us as spirit with the great spirit of the world. At the center of those circles, which reached from the depths of their souls to the depths of the world, stood Susanne von Klettenberg. He turned to the study of quite remarkable works, such as Aurea Catena Homeris. Many intelligent people today will find in it nothing but the most outlandish nonsense. Goethe did not. It was not the kind of information found in a scientific textbook that he discovered there, but rather things that affected him so deeply that he felt powers rising within his soul—powers he had to assume otherwise lie dormant within human beings. He felt like someone born blind, facing the physical world, who, after undergoing surgery, has his eyes opened so that he can now perceive what had previously existed but was imperceptible. He found symbolic thoughts in those books. The dragons, triangles, and symbols of the planets awakened in him a sense that our soul can become like an organ for spiritual worlds.

[ 9 ] He was still in this frame of mind when he moved to Strasbourg. The first atmospheric scenes of Faust emerged from this mood. Thus, it is a part of his soul, of his very lifeblood, when we see Faust right at the beginning, as he has immersed himself in all the sciences—just as Goethe did in Leipzig—and then, dissatisfied with this, attempts to penetrate the supernatural world through a special method of spiritual research. — Nostradamus, Signs of the World Macrocosm. He now has Faust experience that his soul is still too small to develop within himself a sense of the greater world. He seeks to evoke within himself the mood with which he can penetrate into what lives as the spiritual, beyond earthly existence. He summons the Earth Spirit. From the answer the Earth Spirit gives him,

Amid the floods of life, in the storm of deeds I surge back and forth, I weave to and fro! Birth and grave, An eternal sea, A shifting weave, A blazing life, Thus I create at the whirring loom of time And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 10 ] It becomes clear that while the Earth Spirit is indeed a creative, productive force, and while life finds expression in the elements of earthly existence, one thing is missing: there are no passions or desires—only birth and death. The Earth Spirit appears as a being whose character expresses the higher, desire-free, purified forces of human nature. It is an important law of the spiritual world that knowledge is not independent of moral striving. Knowledge of a higher order can only be attained when our soul sheds what is connected with desires, emotions, inclinations, and passions. Passions slumber in the depths of the soul, permeating the world of thought and knowledge. Goethe knew that the purity of the Earth Spirit was an ideal, but he also knew how difficult it was to fulfill. When the Earth Spirit then calls out to Faust:

You resemble the spirit you understand, not me,

[ 11 ] It sounds like the echo of his own inner self, which is aware of how far removed it is from what the true spirit of knowledge actually is.

[ 12 ] The body also prevents, through its materiality, the emergence of the pure forces that can draw near to the spirit. Faust feels: I am held back by what I do not see in my outward physicality—not by material forces, but by what is supersensory within that physicality. The embodiment of this supersensible element within physicality is Mephistopheles; this is the spirit that Faust comprehends for the time being. From this arise all the scenes in which he depicts how this companion and fellow attempts to guide Faust through the entire life of sensuality, repeatedly trying to pull him down from the realms of spiritual life into that which a human being, as spirit and soul, can experience only within physicality. Step by step, Faust seeks to overcome Mephistopheles. Through the development of his own soul, he wants to penetrate the spiritual world at any cost. But not through artificial, tumultuous means—such as spiritualism—rather, [Goethe] earnestly allows the world to work upon him bit by bit, until he sees in every detail of nature something like written characters that express the mysterious life of nature. After all he had seen in minerals and plants, he wishes to make a journey to India to view what he had discovered in its own context, to “read” it once more with the powers of the spirit that had now become his own. Phenomenon by phenomenon, fact by fact, he wants to allow them to take effect on the soul, so that through the spiritual eyes and ears developed for the soul, the spiritual natural principles of existence may emerge from the facts.

[ 13 ] In Italy, he examines everything to see if it can be a character in the vast cosmos. After seeing the works of art, he writes—he who had previously been a follower of Spinoza’s theory:

Where there is necessity, there is God!

[ 14 ] because he felt that spirituality reigns behind art, that the individual work of art is a letter, and that letter by letter, work of art by work of art, they come together to teach us to read what spirit lies behind humanity’s creative activity in relation to art. Nature, plants, animals—and everything in the mineral world as well—do not belong to the dead material realm, but are symbols of the spirit that reigns behind them.

[ 15 ] When Faust now addresses the Earth Spirit:

Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything,
That I asked for. You did not in vain
Turn your face toward me in the fire

[ 16 ] etc., it is as if he were saying: I now view the sublime spirit differently—the spirit that once touched me like a premonition, which made me unhappy because I could not bring it to fruition. I am beginning to understand you! The difference between the Promethean drive of the young Goethe and the encompassing wisdom of the older Goethe is expressed in the fact that he does not want Faust to translate the words “In the beginning was the Word” in the translation of the first chapter of the Gospel of John; in contrast, in Pandora (1807) he writes:

Straight from heaven
Words and deeds descend as a blessing,
A gift descends, previously unimagined.

[ 17 ] Man is more than what he conceals within himself; he is something over which great cosmic forces struggle—forces of good and evil—Prologue in Heaven. The human soul is the arena of their struggle. The world of the soul is a world of spiritual colors and sounds: To spiritual ears, the new day is already being born with sound; it trumpets, it blares—the unheard is not heard.